Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday November 14, 2006 @04:36PM
from the stop-fighting-live-together-it'll-all-be-over-soon dept.

GameSpot reports that Wikipedia has closed the next-gen console entries because of nigh-onto constant defacement from angry fanbois. From the article: "Last week the complete Nintendo company page was replaced with the phrase "Nintendo Sucks!!!!!!!!!" briefly before the Web site reloaded the original entry. Previous vandalism efforts include someone doodling on a Hitler moustache and horns on the photograph for the entry for Bill Gates, and the sentence "Microsoft is Zomg T3h Suck0r!!!!!!" briefly replacing the computer software company's page. All of the next-generation consoles make it into the company's top 40 list of most revised pages, with the Nintendo Wii at number 10 (12,780 revisions), the PS3 at number 21 (9,894 revisions), and the Xbox 360 at 25 (9,481 revisions.) Interestingly, the Wii seems to attract more conflicts of opinion on the site than the subjects of Scientology (8,475 revisions), God (7,537 revisions), and even Britney Spears (9,886 revisions.)"

I like the idea of treating people who editorially vandalize (or just edit-while-stupid) categories such "God" also being considered "fanbois." I guess we can consider "fanbois" as a secular, popular-culture version of a Jihadist.

I'm not sure how this is news. Anonymous and very new users can't edit the entries, but all accounts older than 4 days can, so the articles are still updated almost as fast as before. And numerous pages [wikipedia.org] are semi-protected every day as vandalism flares up and dies down. Judging by semi-protection only, the consoles aren't any worse off than Lucille Ball, Tundra, or Michelangelo...

I found it interesting that the Wii was 10th on the most edited list. I suppose the "newsworthiness" of this is not the fact that vandalism is happening- period. The interesting fact is the magnitude of the vandalism.

I wouldn't find it interesting that a subway car got spray-painted. I would find it interesting that all the subway cars in NYC got vandalized overnight.

It isn't news. First, it's inaccurate; the article talks as if the PS3 and Wii articles are locked away from any editing at all. For some reason journalists still can't get their facts straight when it comes to the two kinds of page protections(protecting and semi-protecting) Wikipedia has. Second, this isn't an event of any significance as it happens all the time; Wikipedia often protects [wikipedia.org] and semi-protects [wikipedia.org] articles that are on controversial topics, topics covered heavily in news media, or topics that draw a huge number edits from random users.

This is concrete proof that the Enyclopedia Brittanica is superior. They have exactly zero [britannica.com] revisions to their Wii page! No vandalism in sight. They really have their [britannica.com] priorities [britannica.com] straight [britannica.com].

I've never heard that pronunciation of Internet, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear it in the South. As for shotgun, it refers to the frontier days when the front of a horse drawn stage coach always had a driver (holding the reigns of the horses) and a passenger with a shotgun (shotgun for protection from would-be robbers). This came to be referred to as riding shotgun, and the name stuck even after the passenger stopped carrying a shotgun and the vehicle switched to horseless carriages then to automobil

Language trolls are small-minded idiots."XXXX people are funny things. Apparently there's a set of complex rules of pronunciation which are occasionally violated, God only knows how they know what they're saying to each other!"

Whatever country you are from, whatever language you speak, there will be things you say that other native speakers would say differently. In English the semi-regularity of our spelling leads some people to insist that the members of a certain group (Americans, Southerners, Welsh, B

Love their Scientology page, about as accurate description you can possibly give that wouldn't lead to being sued (ie not descriptive at ALL). Hell it didn't even bother to mention that Dianetics was intended to be SciFi.

Hell if you could prove it the church of scientology wouldn't exist at all. The book of Dianetics talks endlessly about "Scientology" and yet Hubbard wasn't initially a member nor did he belong to the church for a long time. He wrote it as some sorta crossover novel its intention was to be a "self-help" book for some alien species. It was never intended to be factual. But he thought it would be awfully clever to market it as a real book. He stupidly assumed people would understand it wasn't real.But no I ca

They didn't lock down the Sega or Dreamcast articles because the Dreamcast is so many orders of magnitude better than all of the other consoles, it's not even worth attempting to dispute. Even trolls are smarter than that, clearly.

The PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 (listed alphabetically) on the other hand are all pretty close, so there's plenty of argument to be had there.

.. albeit in reference to Amiga Zealots... "Why are you so insecure? Anyone would think we'd dissed your girlfriend... Oh, now we understand!"

I mean, honestly - why the hell do people think consoles need their loyalty? The companies behind them are out to make cash, which is what corporations do. They have their own marketing budget, people paid loads of cash to sell games and consoles and so forth. And before anyone mentions 'viral marketing', this kind of crap would only serve to put me off buying a console.

Well, there is the usual adolescent desire for everyone to be the same. They'll pick on queers, blacks, nerds, tall people, short people, etc. ad nauseum.

However, there may be a bit of rationality behind it. I remember making fun of atari 400 and sinclair 1000 owners because they didn't have a real keyboard, TI owners for paying too much, and every time I'd meet a fellow commodore owner I'd get all exited and start trading programs. It felt good to find someone else who'd made the same decision that I did, and it had a payoff in terms of being able to trade experiences, techniques, and programs.

It is possible that this kind of behavior makes sense in a way. After all, if everyone owned a Wii there'd be more games for it.

I'll never understand it now that I'm not a kid anymore. I'll also never understand getting in a fight with someone over their religion, country, favorite team, etc., but it happens every day.

I mean, honestly - why the hell do people think consoles need their loyalty? The companies behind them are out to make cash, which is what corporations do. They have their own marketing budget, people paid loads of cash to sell games and consoles and so forth. And before anyone mentions 'viral marketing', this kind of crap would only serve to put me off buying a console.

For the most part, here, you're referring to a group of people here who have great amounts of their personal identity onto their purchase of, and allegiance to, a particular product. This isn't anything new -- or relegated to gamers -- think of the grown men you know who would actively define themselves by their brand of truck. I think that when people are in a situation where they feel that they have no ability to carve out their own indentity -- be it feelings of impotence or just a general lack of creativity -- they will turn to external means to establish who and what they are in the eyes of others.

Quite simply, like any other group which defines shared identity as a similar product choice, or belief in a shared ideology, gamer fanbois are, at the root, confused individuals who are searching for a sense of belonging. There's a large population of the "gamer" population that's, quite frankly, socially awkward. Evangelizing a game system (or a brand of PC, or a genre of music, etc) gives these people an easy way to feel a "connection" with a social group that doesn't require any alteration in the way that they deal with the world or interact with other human beings.

When I was a teenager, I was really into hardcore music for the same reason. My skills of actually holding a conversation were fairly limited, but I knew that I could hang out with my "hardcore friends" or log onto a message board and 'communicate' in the way which I was comfortable. This in and of itself is fairly harmless, but the insular nature of these sort of 'product cliques' will almost always eventually turn to "us against them" codifications as the individuals within the group struggle to establish their own socially hierarchy. In my days as an elitist asshole, it was the 'corporate drones' who would 'actually buy this mass-produced music' that were the de facto topics of my rage. For these kids it's the 'idiots' who would 'actually buy [system].' It's the same motivation in both cases -- a desire for acceptance, at its root.

Other platforms decrease the amount of games available by taking developer mindshare, and introduces the risk that your chosen platform might become unprofitable and discontinued. So, in a very real sense, each platform decreases the value of all the other platforms. Once you choose one, it is in your interests to promote it.

I find it disheartening that young gamers feel the need to find a single console and lock onto it with a religious fervor. We're all gamers, we all enjoy the same hobby, but a large part of the community spends its time decrying everyone else.

The only reason I can think of that this happens, immaturity aside, is that young gamers must rely on their parents to buy consoles and their parents probably limit them to one console of choice because of price. This may give the kid a need to prove to himself and others that he got the very best console possible and made the best decision, because if he didn't make the best decision he'll never be able to buy the other console(s) and fix the problem.

Too bad they can't just relax and enjoy the different experiences offered by all the consoles.

Back when I was single and lived in my own apartment, I had an N64. I enjoyed 007 and Perfect Dark, and thought life was good. Then, a buddy of mine came over for some drinks and started giving me a hard time about my choice of toys. He was a Playstation guy and thought his toy was much better than mine. I was sort of shocked that anyone would actually care what my choice of game console was... It has gotten worse though...

Part of the fun of being a kid is having the energy and enthusiasm to cheer lead the system you own, while dissing the system your best friend's parents bought him instead. It's fun, and just because it's now progressed onto the internet doesn't make it any less harmless then it's ever been.

Part of the fun of being a kid is having the energy and enthusiasm to cheer lead the system you own, while dissing the system your best friend's parents bought him instead. It's fun, and just because it's now progressed onto the internet doesn't make it any less harmless then it's ever been.

Correct. What's sad is the amount of adults that are professional PR for the corporations... but don't get paid for it.

When I was a kid, me and my friends debated the merits of one Ninja Turtles lunchbox over the other, and fought over which chick in Mortal Kombat 3 was the hottest. I'm glad that I didn't have access to the internet then- I don't think that I want to know what sort of spam I'd be responsible for.

Part of the fun of being a kid is having the energy and enthusiasm to cheer lead the system you own

Part of the fun of being a parent is teaching you child why they shouldn't be little assholes so they grow out of that phase in their lives eventually. Instead we outlaw discipline, have pep-rallies, endzone celebrations in high-school football games, and encourage childish behaviors right up into early adulthood.

It is not harmless to let your kid be a little brat with no guidance on why it is wrong. Someday they will have to grow up and work with other people instead of having a need to one-up everybody.

I saw a sig once to the effect that the average slashdot poster is an idiot, and 50% are below average. Certainly a troubling thought, if we're supposed to be an intelligent community, or something. But I think that the truth is that idiots are louder, and poorly conceived and ill-balanced arguments are easier to yell. You may have also noticed this in, say, politics. I imagine most people may have preferences, but a disproportionate percentage

I find it disheartening that young gamers feel the need to find a single console and lock onto it with a religious fervor. We're all gamers, we all enjoy the same hobby, but a large part of the community spends its time decrying everyone else.

The most astoundingly stupid argument you can hear in a console X vs. console Y vs. PC debate is hardware. For many people, hardware by itself is everything; it doesn't matter what kind of graphics it produces or what kind of games are available for the platform, as long as the specs are, at the very least, theoretically superior to other platforms. Doesn't matter that Neverwinter Nights 2 looks and runs like shit while several GameCube and Xbox games look a lot better, it only matters that NWN2 is being played on a AMD64 with dual GF 7900s, while the aforementioned consoles have inferior hardware. Doesn't matter that Resident Evil 4 is crazy awesome and looks great, the GameCube's hardware is inferior to the Xbox's, at least on paper. I can't play shit like that, what would people think? Now I can't even play the Xbox because the Xbox 360 is better!

For a real gamer, hardware is just a means to an end (PC), or entirely irrelevant (consoles). Sure, you can be enthusiastic about hardware, but as soon as you start saying shit like "I can't play the GameCube because it has a 485 MHz CPU," you become an asshat.

unfortunately it is difficult for the younger gamers to come up with the approximate $1250 to be able to enjoy all three from the get go. This leads me back to the argument that they (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) should just give away a certain percentage of their stock in boxes of cheerios. I mean, they're already paying out the ass to subsidize (well not Nintendo, but that's just how they roll) them, but the $500 in our pockets launch day could be better spent on software and accessories. . .

Wikipedia is excellent for some content but sucks for other. Many pages are bloated with fanboyish crap (+/=useless details) while they miss some important facts and - often - lack any critical approach ("bad side" of story often gets deleted by fans). While it can be very useful and condensed source of information, Wikipedia should not be only source of information, especially for stuff of wide (non-expert) interest.

Heck, they're just game consoles.I can understand people getting <b>annoyed</b> about stuff related to them, but angry? People are getting onto shakey ground (personality wise) if they really are getting angry about which console "rulz".

It's also a shame that some console owners feel the need to deface a public resource to validate the choice they made in the "war".

It's a shame more people don't get angry enough to get off their arses to go and vote. Or get angry about the other dozens of issu

Always wanting to defend the system they worship, and blasting down the other systems.
Ex: "GCN and PS2 are kiddie. X-Box the way to go." or "Nintendo is best, hands down. Sony, MS and 3rd parties can all rot in hell." or "Sony is KING! Nintendo and Microsoft sucks."
I'll never, ever, understand them. Silly fanboys.

Wikipedia was set up in 2001, and initially there was much skepticism that an encyclopedia wholly written, edited, and peer-edited by the general public would be a reliable source of information, but it is now in common usage.

Now I love Wikipedia and think it represents the future of... stuff, and all, and I definitely think it's a good and legitimate place to do research, but this quote implies that those fears went away. If fact, the number or people vocalizing these fears have been growing since the

The entries weren't "closed", they were "semi-protected". From the headline one might assume the entries had been withdrawn. That would be notable, but restricting editing to registered users isn't very dramatic, so some idiot decided to sex up the story.

IMHO the absolute BEST scenario would be if ALL of the next gen consoles rocked. If they were all spectacular and all had their own unique feature that adds to the world of gaming. This would encourage them all to work even harder to out-compete eachother for the next round. In then end, benefiting us all. Suppose one of them ends up killing all others by a huge margin. This will stifle competition- the top dog will get lazy and won't innovate so well for their next gen, and the losers won't have the money

Best for whom? Rabidly attaching one's loyalty to what appears to be the coolest system is what fills the need (temporarily) of the fanbois to belong to and identify with a group and idea that is bigger and cooler than they are. Defacing webpages is a rite of passage that proves their loyalty and helps cement their self-image as belonging.If all the consoles appeared equal, and there were no clear winners (based on whatever criteria a given fanboi was using), they would be confused and not know who to ide